Pros

Cons

Bottom Line

Microsoft Teams is an excellent collaboration service, with the large caveat that it's only available to Office 365 users.

July 16, 2018

Undoubtedly attracted by all the success other companies have been having in the online collaboration space, Microsoft designed its Teams app to let virtual groups combine their efforts across applications, files, and meetings. For $5 per user per month, Microsoft goes to great pains to take the best aspects of Slack and essentially build them into Office 365 using Teams as the wedge. Not only does this integration give it a leg up from a feature perspective, Microsoft's large array of value-add partners and third-party Office 365 add-on apps give it even more power.

For those of you who've never used a chat app at work, here's a small primer: Programs like Slack, HipChat, Workplace by Facebook, and now Teams provide you with a corporate-wide workspace in which your teams can have conversations as large groups or in smaller, private groups. Want to discuss marketing strategy? Create a private marketing chat room. Want to discuss the National Basketball Association? Create a private sports chat room. Want to send a message to the entire company? Send the message in the General channel.

As chat apps have evolved, they've enabled companies to include video conferencing tools, embedded video via YouTube, GIFs via Giphy, file sharing, and storage. Microsoft Teams can do all this in a cohesive and embedded manner by connecting Redmond's large ecosystem of business apps to the Teams interface on a desktop, or via a mobile app across Android, iOS, and Windows phones. Take a look at our deeper dive into the Microsoft Teams iOS app for a sense of how the simply designed mobile experience handles channel-based collaboration, calling, chat, and alerts.

As of July 2018, Microsoft has brought Teams even closer to its arch-nemisis, Slack, by giving it the one thing Slack's always had that Microsoft tends to forget: A free version that's actually worth the download, at least for smaller businesses. That's because the free tier has a limit of 300 users. By contrast, Slack has no such limitation, but then again, 300 users will certainly cover most small businesses employee rosters. The Teams free tier also has no message limit, meaning that even companies using the free version can rely on Teams to let them search their entire message history with no worries concerning eventual deletion due to message cap. Though, while there's no message cap, there are storage limits, but even these are fairly lenient with 10GB as a base and another 2GB per user. Finally, Teams even adds the niceties for free users, including user-to-user voice calls as well as group voice sessions, too. You can even leverage not only Teams' Office 365 integration, but any third-party app integrations you want to built yourself. That's a lot of muscle for a free app, and it should Microsoft well in its ongoing Slack war.

Microsoft Teams: Interface

When you first open Teams, you see a left-hand rail that includes the Activity, Chat, Teams, Meetings, and Files tabs. Click into a tab to see the different channels and files that exist within the subgroup. The Teams interface is designed with a standard blue, grey, purple, and white theme that straddles the line between playful and serious. If this isn't your cup of tea, you can adjust Team's themes to one of two wackier and less corporate options.

Unlike Slack, which relies on a thread of conversations focused solely on the channel's topic, Teams lets you silo topics within a channel in order to help you better manage conversations. For example: If your advertising team alternates between conversations about TV and billboard buys, you can create a sub-conversation within the channel for both topics. This provides a more buttoned-up feel than what you'll get in Slack, which provides a more stream of group consciousness philosophy to chatting, which can be good or bad, depending on how your mind works.

If you require lots of structure, Teams is absolutely more organized than Slack. However, this organization can also be daunting. Whereas Slack and Atlassian HipChat focus primarily on chat rooms, Teams' five-pronged approach to navigation leaves more room for navigational error. Thankfully, like HipChat and Slack, whenever you're mentioned directly anywhere within the Teams application, a red alert pops up on the Activity tab and directs you to your exact destination. You can customize your alerts to notify you only when you're mentioned directly, or you can set alerts to notify you whenever any activity happens within a specific room. You can also mark activities as "read" and "unread" in order to set them aside for later. These are the minute features that separate Teams from other collaboration apps on the market.

At the top of every channel, you'll see a list of pre-populated services and tools that provide more context to the channel. Tools like ZenDesk, Microsoft Power BI, and Excel are easily accessible so users can view third-party or external data within the context of the channel. Users can view a document or application while having a conversation along the right side of the file, so as to not disrupt the conversation. All cloud-based tools that update in real time will update within the feed. Unfortunately, in order to make changes to the applications you'll be directed out of Teams and into a web browser. So, if you're viewing a Word document in Teams, and you notice a typo, you can chat with your colleagues to let them know a typo exists, but neither of you can actually fix the typo without being redirected to Office 365 on the Microsoft Edge browser.

Microsoft claims it is investigating ways to enable changes within the Teams experience, which would be a humongous coup. As of today, tools like Asana, HipChat, and Slack only allow users to attach documents that can be viewed by individual users. Teams is the only tool that lets everyone look at a document within the context of a chatroom's thread. If Microsoft can enable real-time editing within the thread, it will have greatly surpassed its rivals' functionality.

Alongside the embedded tools you'll also find related files, a company organizational chart (powered by Active Directory), and an Activity tab, which is a running history of all of your interactions within the specific group.

Super Social

As with Slack and HipChat, you can easily embed files and GIFs from Giphy using shortcuts. You can also create memes by clicking on a design, cartoon, or image and then plugging in text. This is one of many examples of Microsoft embedding an experience into Teams; on Slack and HipChat, you have to leave the application to grab images and add text in order to create memes. It may seem minor, but given the highly social and collegial nature of chat apps, the ability to stay within the tool is crucial in order to save time for more professional work. Heck, you can even use an emoji to name a chat room. Slack won't even let you use uppercase letters or multiple words.

Teams allows you to connect to most cloud-based applications in real time. For example: You can plug a Twitter feed or a Facebook page into a Teams channel. This means that whenever a new tweet or update loads it gets pushed into the conversation stream. This is a truly valuable experience, especially for organizations that rely on third-party information and timely responses to do their jobs (or for people like me who are too lazy to leave the Teams experience to check their Facebook notifications).

If you see a video icon next to a conversation, there's an open videoconference happening. You can jump into the meeting and take part, or you can avoid the channel so as not to be disruptive. These video chats aren't Skype conversations, so you don't have to worry about the back-end server implications of your Skype/Skype for Business accounts. Anyone in your Teams account can click on your name, click the video icon, and call you.

You can also schedule video calls for a later date, and the tool will alert you that the call is about to begin, which is a nice upgrade over the basic video call feature available in HipChat and Slack. Teams even lets you view someone's Outlook calendar to determine the perfect time to schedule a Teams video call. All videocalls can be set to "recurring" so you won't have to manually check everyone's schedules every time you want to have a conference call. More importantly, you can squeeze a whopping 80 participants into one Teams video call, which is four times as many as HipChat allows, and more than four times as many as Slack allows (15).

Bots in Microsoft Teams

No chat app would be complete without its own unique bots. Teams integrates with PollyBot to allow you to take polls within a channel. So, if you're trying to decide where to have the company holiday party, you can list three restaurants and have your team vote on which one they'd prefer. This would be a great feature for PCMag: We constantly argue about the temperature here in our labs. With PollyBot we could easily take a poll in Teams to determine whether the thermostat needs to be turned up, down, or left alone.

T-Bot allows you to query the Teams tool in order to access automated answers about the Teams application. Ask the tool how to create memes or GIFs, and the bot surfaces content to help you perform an action. Unfortunately, T-Bot isn't the most helpful bot you'll encounter. I asked, "What time is it?" and it couldn't provide a response. I asked for a Team member's title and it couldn't provide a response. However, when I asked "How can I connect a Teams account to Outlook?" and "How do I create a new Word doc?" it surfaced the exact content I needed to help me accomplish my task.

WhoBot will eventually sit on the Microsoft graph and pull in Active Directory data to help you discover or learn more about people within your organization. If you ask WhoBot a question about a person, or if you ask about a specific subject, the bot will surface the person for whom you're looking, or subject matter experts in your organization who can help you find more information. You can also click on someone's profile and see where he or she sits on your company's org chart. Unfortunately, WhoBot wasn't connected to the application we tested for review, but T-Bot said WhoBot would be coming soon, and a human Microsoft rep confirmed that it would eventually be available.

The Possibilities

Teams is included in Office 365 Business Essentials, Business Premium, or Enterprise E1, E3, and E5 plan accounts. It is currently unclear if you will one day be able to buy Teams as a standalone application, or if you'll always need to purchase it as part of a new office 365 Business account. As I previously mentioned, Teams has integrated with more than 100 partners, including Zendesk, Asana, and HootSuite. It is built with an open application programming interface, which means your company's developers can plug your existing applications into Teams in order to create similar embedded interactions.

Microsoft is also encouraging developers to create business-specific experiences and customizations for Teams. This is a dramatic departure from the other newcomer to the space Workplace by Facebook, which only connects with Google G Suite, Okta, OneLogin, Ping, and Windows Azure AD. Although we generally enjoyed the group dynamic delivered in Workplace, we found it to be severely lacking the group collaboration functionality that makes Teams so dynamic.

Teams is a game-changer for any organization that would like its employees to spend the majority of their time in or near the application. If PCMag were to plug our content management system into the Teams interface (which is possible, by the way) there would be very little reason for me to ever leave Teams throughout the day. I assume an Edge plug-in will become available within the next year, which means that you'll never have to leave Teams to use a web browser. There is no indication that this integration is in the works, but it seems like a no-brainer. Today, instead of Edge, you can plug in specific websites you'd like to navigate within the context of a channel. For example: You can add Bing to a channel to enable in-channel web searches. This is a solid option for extra-curricular Teams usage, but an inevitable Edge integration would be ideal. If it does come to fruition, Teams will function almost like Windows-within-Windows…

…which means you should expect Cortana integration at some point, as well. An integration with Windows' voice assistant will bring Teams to the ultimate level. You'll be able to ask T-Bot questions without having to type. You'll be able to launch video calls without pressing a button. You'll be able to pull up a PowerPoint presentation, send it to your boss via a chat message, then create a meme that says something like "Too easy!" without ever having to touch your laptop. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. As of today you still can't even create a GIF using a Giphy shortcut the way you can in Slack. Teams is incredible, but it's still in its infancy.

The Bottom Line

It's clear that Slack and HipChat are about to have some serious competition. Teams is capable, flexible, and enjoyable to use. Unfortunately, Teams comes with one humongous caveat: Only organizations that are heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem will use Teams at full efficiency. If you're a company invested in Google Drive, or if you're on team Zoho, Teams won't really appeal to you in the same way it will to Microsoft Office 365 power users.

That said, I predict companies will make the switch to Office 365 in order to take advantage of Teams's impeccable organization and connectivity. The ability to review and approve documents within a video call means teams can essentially remove in-person meetings from the collaboration equation. The same can be said for its third-party integratations: Zendesk reps can answer customer service tickets, Asana team members can delegate tasks, and analytics teams can pivot strategy as Power BI dashboards update in real-time—all from within Teams.

Microsoft couldn't have created Teams without the blueprint created by Editors' Choice winners HipChat and Slack. Those two services already have wide adoption, and Slack in particular has a strong hold on the mindshare of the technoscenti at the moment. It's unclear to what extent Teams can steal customers from these two early movers. But even if teams only makes inroads among Office 365 users, it's sure be a big success, and it wins an Editors' Choice for collaboration services.

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About the Author

Juan Martinez is PCMag's Senior Editor, Business. His work and commentary has been featured in NBCNews.com, FoxBusiness.com, Entrepreneur, Reuters TV, Esquire.com, Publishers Weekly, ClickZ, ZDNet, TechRepublic, TechRadar, Content Marketing Institute, CRM Magazine and Direct Marketing News. He has a master's degree in creative writing from Columbia University and a bachelor's degree from Bard College. Prior to PCMag, Juan was the Senior Editor of TechRadar Pro, and a Technology Editor at CBS Interactive. He can be reached at juan_martinez@pcmag.com. Follow Juan on Twitter at @jrobertmartinez. See Full Bio